C. S. Holling,
Editor-in-Chief1Department of Zoology, University of Florida

This second issue of Conservation Ecology begins a Special
Focus on global climate change. This Special Focus initiates a series
of occasional experiments to explore the interactive potential of an
electronic journal. The overall focus of these experiments is the
present and emerging class of global issues that present novel
challenges to the integrity of ecosystems and regional economies. The
consequences of biodiversity loss, emergence of novel diseases, and
interhemispheric disruption of animal migration are examples. Global
climate change, the most obvious current issue, is emphasized in this
Special Focus.

Four papers launch this experiment, two to be published in this issue
of Conservation Ecology and two to be published in the future.
Each paper opens a key avenue of understanding and uncertainty. They
are intended to initiate a process that will draw upon the knowledge
and experience of the Conservation Ecology community to deepen
and broaden understanding. The process includes a way for readers to
easily respond to each paper, two internet-based dialogues triggered
by all four papers, and a published synthesis of the results of the
entire "experiment" by April 1998. The goal is to engage the
community of scientists, scholars, and practitioners to integrate the
ecological, economic, and social causes and consequences of global
change and of policies to deal with it. A central point is that such
efforts will fail unless they recognize the opportunities,
uncertainties, and surprises that emerge from interactions across
scales, local to planetary and intercommunity to international.

The lead Synthesis paper, "Challenges in adaptive
management of riparian and coastal ecosystems" by Carl Walters,
provides a policy focus that has seldom been considered in literature
or debate on climate change. Most attention is given to mitigation
policies that can coordinate international efforts to slow the
accumulation of greenhouse gases. Because greenhouse gases will
inevitably accumulate for decades or more, and climate will probably
change as a consequence, regions will be exposed to novel extremes in
climate and novel ecosystem responses to those extremes. Under such
novel conditions, it can be dangerous to apply existing knowledge and
experience alone. An active, adaptive approach designs policies as
probes of changing systems to create new knowledge and adjust existing
knowledge.

Development of adaptive ecosystem management, considered by Walters,
began about 30 years ago to deal with the novelty, uncertainty, and
surprise caused by human-induced changes in the underlying structures
and processes of ecosystems. Carl Walters pioneered the process,
modeling approach, methods, and theories, and has been a key figure in
continuing developments and tests throughout three decades. Literally
no one else in the world has accumulated such a rich body of
experience in regional-scale examples of resources and management
where uncertainty is high and change is inevitable. He has been
centrally involved in dozens of cases in North America, Europe, and
Australia. His paper will, I judge, become a classic in the field.
He notes the extraordinary science, methods, and approaches that have
been developed and tested, arguing that we know how, in principle, to
deal with those parts of the issues. The challenges now facing
adaptive ways of dealing with novelty and uncertainty are not
scientific or methodological, but institutional, organizational,
behavioral, and political. He ends with a series of 15 critical
questions. We invite readers to use the response "button" at the end
of his paper to comment on those challenges by briefly summarizing
other experience, analyses, or papers. Those questions will also
provide the initial seeds for an internet dialogue planned for early
in the New Year.

The second Synthesis paper is "An overview of the
implications of global change for natural and managed terrestrial
ecosystems" by Brian Walker and Will Steffen. It is a unique
statement, not because it is based on decades of pioneering research
and experience, such as Walters', but because it is the first
published summary synthesizing six years of international
collaborative research on the impacts of global change on terrestrial
ecosystems in every region and continent of the world. That study,
sponsored by the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme of the
International Council of Scientific Unions, has no parallel. A book
on specifics of the research is in press. One principal conclusion of
the study has dramatic policy consequences: the transformations driven
by greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity losses, land use changes,
and economic development converge to turn terrestrial ecosystems from
sinks for carbon from the atmosphere to sources of carbon to the
atmosphere. Thus, CO2 fertilization of plant growth will
not be sufficient, as some hoped, for terrestrial ecosystems to
provide a natural correction to greenhouse gas accumulations in the
atmosphere. As traditional ecosystems become an additional source of
CO2, the need to mitigate human-induced emissions of
greenhouse gas becomes more urgent.

The third paper, "Impacts on Canadian competitiveness of international
climate change" by Chris Holling and Robin Somerville, is a
Perspective invited because it exposes the extraordinary difficulty of
designing politically feasible economic policies for such
mitigation. It summarizes a detailed econometric study focused on
mitigation policies for one nation, Canada, and its provincial
regions. However, the main study upon which it is based is still
confidential, and its results cannot yet be released. The Perspective
article will be published when the main study has been publicly
released.

Results from the study that have been reported in the press
indicate that the study's planning scenarios are designed to achieve
future national targets by using tradable permits for CO2
emissions and carbon taxes. Over a long term of three decades, press
reports indicate the study forecasts little negative effects on
Canada's overall GDP by achieving emission reductions in this way.
But the political dynamite that makes implementation so difficult is
that there is a projected 2% drop in GDP from "business as usual" for
the first decade and a half of operation of the policy and that dramatic
differences are created between winners and losers. How can politics
deal with those short and long term conflicts in a Federal system with
the decentralized nature of Canada's? Project those and similar
tensions to a world scene of haves and have-nots over an issue that
has many uncertainties, and the route to effective mitigation is bumpy
indeed. It is no surprise that vested interests can mount such
powerful disinformation campaigns exploiting the uncertainties, in
order to confuse discussion and subvert decisions.

The fourth and final Perspective paper, "An evaluation of integrated
climate protection policies for the U.S." by Bernow and Duckworth, was
invited to provide a different, technological evaluation of innovative
paths to mitigating emissions. As it complements the Holling and
Somerville paper, we will publish it when the other becomes available.
The analysis reported by Bernow and Duckworth demonstrates that it is
technologically feasible to dramatically reduce emissions and, at the
same time, stimulate the economy. The Holling and Somerville paper is
a so-called top-down approach; that of Bernow and Duckworth is a
bottom-up approach. The latter identifies and explores technologies
available to each of the separate sectors of the economy, and
describes economic policies and government regulations needed to
establish a technologically feasible path of innovation.

There are dozens of top-down and bottom-up analyses of the economic
impacts of reducing CO2 emissions. When the target is to
stabilize CO2 emissions at 1990 levels, these studies
forecast impacts on the U.S. economy in 2020 ranging from about -2% to
over +2% change in GDP. I find the two Perspectives presented here to
be particularly clear, compelling examples, even though their
conclusions are, in part, very different. As in all forecasts and
models, everything depends on assumptions. The backdrop of confusion
and uncertainty arising from different assumptions has been
brilliantly summarized and the reasons for differences made
transparent by Robert Repetto and Duncan Austin in "The costs of
climate protection: a guide for the perplexed" (World Resources
Institute 1997). The summary, at http://www.wri.org/wri/climate/ccp-home.html,
provides a lovely example of simple web use and clear analysis and
presentation techniques to make the complex understandable.

As readers consider and respond to these separate papers, and as we
initiate internet dialogues, three issues needing discussion stand out
for me.

Most studies of mitigation policies analyze economic impacts
at some fixed future date, essentially a kind of steady-state
forecast, but few analyze the path to that state. The Holling and
Somerville paper does, revealing that, at times, a potentially longer
term "good news" condition can only be reached through an
extraordinarily difficult transition. There may be no politically
feasible path from here to there. How can we begin to better
understand the possible transition trajectories for economies,
societies, and ecosystems?

The degree of difficulty predicted in the transition depends on
assumptions of how easily people respond to change and shift to more
effective technologies. Optimistic forecasts imagine a clearly
logical decision maker making the most logical cost/benefit choices,
with the least incentive, in the most rapid way. More pessimistic
forecasts imagine confused, uncertain decision makers, caught by past
investments and momentum, who will only change when sharp increases in
prices provide little alternative. This is not a question of science
or economics, but of behavior of individuals and organizations. How
can we better understand the sources of novelty and of the processes
by which individuals and organizations either smother or release
novelty?

All of these models and forecasts, of climate change itself and
of impacts on ecosystems and economies, are full of uncertainties and
will always be so. Surprise is inevitable, whatever is done or not,
and will unfold on a regional stage where adaptive response becomes
central. Hence, the long history of experience in adaptive ecosystem
management has major potential. It explicitly embraces uncertainty
and surprise. By designing policies as hypotheses of cause and
designing management as experiments to separate those hypotheses, it
is an approach that accelerates learning and demands flexibility.
Yet, how can it function when uncertainties become the foundation for
powerful interests to design and brilliantly implement disinformation
campaigns? What is the role of science? What is the role of
collaboration among those from science, policy, business, and
politics?

These questions along with those raised explicity by Walters and
implicitly by the other authors served as a starting point for an
internet dialogue involving young scholars and practitioners earlier
this month. This second in a series of "Young Scholar Dialogues"
proved extremely engaging - participants continued to post discussion
items to the on-line conference server even after the scheduled end of
the dialogue. The results of this exchange are synthesized in the
paper "Uncertainty, Climate Change, and Adaptive
Management".

We invite readers to use the response facility in each paper to
respond to the issues raised by this set of papers. Your responses
will become input to the second internet-based dialogue, or workshop,
on regional responses to global change and involving senior
scholars, managers, and policy makers. The results of the whole
experiment will be summarized and published in Conservation
Ecology by April 1998.